Generation ‘Special’

This week’s Newsweek features a piece by David McCullough Jr, a teacher who gave a speech to the 2012 graduating class of Wellesley High School. Visit Wellesley’s website. The school sounds more like a university than a high school. The gist of McCullough’s speech was “You are not special. You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless…We Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement.”

Incendiary words, spoken to children who epitomize the best and the brightest of what this country has to offer. The problem is that the “best” and the “brightest” have ceased to have any real meaning.

We are the educated middle class, the loving parents of these kids. And we have created a protective aura around our children. Just as we remove all manner of objects and food groups that might harm them physically, we remove any sort of failure that might harm their little psyches. Because we believe them to be so special and so perfect, we make sure the world sees them in the same way.

We email or fax reports to school and make no pretense that they are coming from Johnny. We expect A’s, with no concern that A’s have thus become meaningless. We graduate children who can barely read and who cannot think for themselves.

We fight to have Johnny admitted to special ed classes, believing it is better to have the label of special ed than to be “regular.” Regular, average, and normal are no longer acceptable terms for our children.

If Johnny is above average, we demand the designation “gifted.” And we are willing to pay handsomely for it, to bypass the system and get the results we want from those who provide independent educational assessments.

We demand that Johnny makes the most competitive sports team. We don’t care that his making the team might mean that the team will lose or that a worthy child won’t then get a slot that he deserves to get because our child took his place.

We are incensed if a teacher tells us that Johnny isn’t special, or worse, that he is falling behind. We storm into the school and berate the principal for the stupidity of the teacher.

We treat our children’s teachers and coaches like we treat other drivers on the road. They are mere impediments to our getting where we want to be in the most efficient way possible. When we cause an accident, we blame the other driver. When our child fails, we blame the system. We are thus shocked that Perfect Little Johnny turns out to be someone who doesn’t quite come up to the expectations we had for him.

As Newsweek says in a piece titled “Generation ‘Special,’’ “…it seems that affluent parents now have a major beef with how their offspring…correction, the offspring of others…are turning out. Just a bit entitled perhaps? A little unrealistic in expectations? A little complacent?”

There are many caring (and realistic) parents out there, who don’t steamroll over the system. There are many students graduating from high schools who are hardworking and who have never expected anything they didn’t deserve. But there are also many of the others.

These other kids will graduate, some with honors, and go on to colleges they never should have gotten into. They will sit in classes they don’t deserve to be in, and they will struggle to get by or they will simply drop out. But few of them will understand why this has happened to them, and fewer, still, will place any responsibility on themselves.

From Newsweek: “…we’ve given our children everything except for the thing they need most and the thing no one can provide, the ability to find their own core passion without artificial support. And the understanding of how much work, how much sheer effort, it takes to succeed.”

Well said! I work in higher ed, and see the painful results of this every day. Colleges and universities now must offer remedial classes (euphemism: student success services) because the young people admitted are not capable of college level work.

Oh, my! I see kids like this in juvenile court every day. The parents just can’t believe that their little angel would do anything wrong. The kids lie to the parent, and then find it very difficult to admit it to a judge. Then there are the kids who have been pushed so hard to be perfect that they can’t handle it, and are using chemicals or trying to kill themselves (sometimes both). The kids can’t think for themselves, can’t take responsibility for themselves, and find it very difficult to stand up for themselves. Of course, I see only those who were caught by the cops.

When my youngest son was in high school, he and a group of friends broke into a swim club after hours. One of the kids, unbeknownst to the others, brought a six pack. A guard showed up, the kid with the six pack got away (leaving the beer behind), and my son and the others were caught. Then Husband and I told our son, “You broke the law, and you will pay whatever consequences there are.” One kid’s parents immediately hired a lawyer who told him to disassociate himself from the others. They all went to court. The boy with the lawyer got off. My son and the others had to do community service. I know my son learned a big lesson that day. I wonder (sarcastically), exactly what lesson did the kid with the lawyer learn?

I honestly wish there would have been no need to. I was just having a conversation with someone about this the other day, and then today, I read the Newsweek article. It got me upset all over again. I’m a former teacher. I know there were some things like this going on when I was teaching, but it was nothing like it is today.

Two weeks ago I had a rather heated discussion with friends of ours with children. I was trying to explain to them that disappoint and failure are inevitable parts of life and that it is the child’s adult role model’s responsibility to teach them how to cope. I also believe that not succeeding at something helps to build a drive to do better next time. My friends said that since I don’t have any children I don’t understand. They said life sucks and it is important for them to protect their children from that for as long as possible.

I teach at a state college, and the students not only cannot think for themselves, they can barely read or write. Calculating medication dosages (simple math/algebraic equations) overwhelm them. Not all – but a scary percentage…and there is a definite attitude of entitlement “I’m paying for an education. Spoon feed me the information, give me the grade and let’s be done with it…”

I am so depressed (but not surprised) to hear things like this. A close friend works in the counseling dept of a large community college, and a lot of the kids have no idea why they are in school. Even choosing courses to take is beyond them. We are consistantly falling farther and farther beyond other countries in education, yet we seem incapable of turning things around.

Re: letting your kids learn about the real world: My son misbehaved in his late teens. We sat for hours in juvenile courts, treated disrespectfully by authorities, subjected to the rudeness and bad behavior of the subspecies (my son’s new peers). Whenever my boy started to complain about being treated like a second-class citizen, I’d glare at him (because I was getting the same treatment!) and say my then-favorite thing: “You’re their boy.” I meant, you did this thing, you acted like scum, and now our punishment is to be lumped in with scum and be treated like scum. You earned it. They can do anything with you now, because YOU’RE THEIR BOY.

Well, we both survived it. He’s now 34, has a masters’ degree, is a husband and father, is a professional person, but still sometimes reminds me of that time, and the way I refused to coddle him.

Bravo to you! My son is a responsible, hardworking 31 year old, who bought his first home only one year after graduating from college. And he tells me on a regular basis how much he admires his dad and me for how we raised him.

A well stated post! Add to the list of things we neglected to teach the younger generation the skills of civility, the concept of community in the larger sense and respect for our fellow human beings. I have taught and been an administrator pre-school through graduate school. My heart broke for that bus monitor in Greece, NY who was subjected to bullying at vile attacks by a group of 12 year olds on a school bus.

Yes, but did you see she received so many donations from around the country that she may be able to now enjoy a solid retirement? At least she can feel good that many want to reach out to her. At last count it was over $400,000!

Terrific post – and clearly one that prompts a of dialogue. I too held my sons responsible for their actions – and I’d be a liar if I didn’t say that adolescence was an adventure and sometimes scary ride. And they are wonderful, productive, married men now, who indulge their mom with reminders of these moments every once in awhile. Ownership of actions is a big thing with me – still is. I have seen young people enter the workforce with an amazing sense of entitlement. They are stunned by the reception they’re receiving, and completely unprepared to handle the reality that they are not the most gifted person in the room. And they make for emotionally narrow supervisors of others and potential leaders of tomorrow. I applaud the kids for wanting this teacher to provide their commencement address and will give them a standing ‘o’ if they heed his words.

Thanks, Mimi. My parents had no money to send me to college. So after high school, I worked for eight months to save money to pay for my sophmore year. I lived at home for my freshman year and attended a local campus. I got a loan to cover my junior year and was awarded a research assistantship to cover my senior year. While on campus, I worked part time. Because my college education was coming out of my pocket, I never cut a class, I never skipped an assignment, and I never did anything but work my butt off studying for a test. I still managed to have a boyfriend and friends and took advantage of whatever else being in college was about. I wouldn’t have changed my experience for anything. So even though Then Husband and I had the money that our parents never had, we were careful not to raise our kids with any sense of entitlement.

:-) It’s really interesting to see how my sons view some of their peers in the workplace. It’s both unfortunate and pride-inducing – pride in my kids and unfortunate that there are so many indulged young adults who are entering the world with a limited understanding of their ever increasing accountability for it.

My take: Post-WWII affluence and optimism about the future created a generation of parents unlike any who came before. We boomers were the result. Our parents survived the Depression and the war and they were determined that their children would have the best. With the exception of Vietnam, we were raised on optimism,material goods, and easy access to education. As parents, we continued the giving spree, and so many of our children learned only how to take.

Sadly, I think mediocrity in education is not new. Twenty-five years ago I taught beginning and intermediate French as a graduate student and ended up spending hours of classroom time teaching English grammar to American university students because they could not even begin to learn French without it.

Now I am the parent of an 18 year old who spent five years in an NYC public school “gifted program.” Though my daughter is certainly a bright light, she is in no way gifted; the prodigy who plays ten simultaneous chess games while blindfolded is gifted. As you rightly point out, by lowering the bar and allowing everyone to slide up a level of two, we not only cheapen achievement, but set kids up with a nobody-fails-everybody’s-a-genius expectation. There’s going to be hell to pay.

When I dated a guy from California a while ago I looked into studying at an American university (otherwise spending time with him would have been a matter of 3-months tourist visas). I was surprised to learn that undergrad courses take 4 years (as opposed to 3 about anywhere in Europe), and you’d have to take classes in subjects like history and writing essays, stuff that I had learned in highschool. I was also flabbergasted by the question of a highschool graduate which currency we used in Germany, and whether we had the dollar too. That was in late 2001 and I thought it prudent not to venture into Euro territory and left it at Deutschmarks instead.

Your post poignantly highlights the reasons for this kind of development. Although I need to add that it is unfortunately not a purely American phenomenon, I have since observed similar trends in pretty much every ‘western’ society I have been to. Not an encouraging scene. Well, at least it has left me with the strong desire to raise my own children to become responsible and respectful adults who realise that they are not the only people in the world and that all their actions, good or bad, have consequences.

Absolutely! This is why I set the tone for praise and standards in my classroom from the very beginning every school year. Only I’d let the kids come up with the ideas, so they’d have ownership of The Unwritten Plan. Proactive engagement. And, boy, oh, boy, did my kids do terrifically well. I was… still am… so very proud of them… and their parents… ’cause we had a three-way contract that freed us to achieve beyond praise.

Amen, Renee! I was trying to watch this speech last week on my laptop, but YouTube kept freezing.

I could not agree more with this sense of entitlement so many parents bestow upon their kids. I don’t think my parents did that with us, but sometimes I think I failed to realize the amount of effort it takes to succeed, as mentioned here. Or maybe good parents just make it look easy :)

Amen, sister! This reminds me of an advice columnist who was asked by a guy about constantly bailing out his girlfriend. She said “it’s nice of you to rescue a damsel in distress, but as far as marriage you should ask yourself; do you want to go through life with a distressed damsel?”

One of the first things someone told me when I started teaching was that if your doctor tells you you have bronchitis, you don’t tell them they’re doing it wrong. But people will always believe they know more about your job than you do.

Is there a correlation between out-of-control entitlement (kids AND adults) and the lowering of the taste level? Would Alistair Cooke read Seven Shades of Grey? Would he come in contact with it without rubber gloves (aw, not that kind of rubber gloves…)?

It was precisely because I saw this kind of thing happening that I went in a different direction with my daughter. I always let her know she was the most loved, adorable, special child in the world to ME. But the world out there wasn’t always going to think the same way. There were going to be people who would expect her to be intelligent, hard working & kind (besides me). Life wasn’t always going to be fair, but if you worked hard it generally balanced out. I am very proud of my daughter – she is hardworking, kind, compassionate & driven. She is generally a very nice person. I wish she would call her mother a little more often, but . . .

I agree with Sienna … our taste standards have dropped through the basement, and I think much of that is because we’ve handed over the (remote) control to our children … because they “work” so hard, they deserve to watch a few hours of TV, right? My parents didn’t allow us to watch crap they thought was crap — they turned it off. Instead, nobody turns anything off, so we get Real Housewives of Atlanta and Fifty Shades of Garbage… We are allowing our chlidren to watch all kinds of violent video games and horrific TV shows and never challenging the wisdom of that… it’s such a cop=out. Great article, Renee!!!

Thanks, Betty. We graduate kids from high school who can barely read, from college who have never read a book or written a paper, and we place them in jobs they have little resources with which to do. Then add that to an almost complete unawareness of history or culture beyond pop culture. Then be shocked that other countries have surpassed us in education and productivity.

Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You

This book's first two sentence had me riveted: "Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet." Thus starts the unraveling of a seemingly happy, educated, achievement-oriented family. As I got deeper and deeper into the book, I saw more and more that love can unwittingly become a form of abuse. The parents in this story will do anything to make sure their children, especially their daughter Lydia, escape the pitfalls they, themselves, encountered in life. The result is a family in a downward spiral that is painful, and ultimately tragic. The writing is a sheer joy, even when the words are almost unbearable to read. And, while the reader knows Lydia's fate with the first sentence, and her family knows it very soon thereafter, the reader doesn't find out the circumstances until almost the end of the book. This is one that will stay with you for a long time.